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Preview of Dragos Inc. & NaturEner at ARC Industry Forum

January 9, 2018

By
Larry O'Brien

Category:

Industry Trends

The ARC Industry Forum in Orlando is only four weeks away. We have considerably expanded our cybersecurity program at the Forum this year, and as a preview ARC vice president and cybersecurity domain expert Sid Snitkin interviewed NaturEner's Marc DeNarie and Dragos Inc. founder and CEO Robert Lee. In this podcast, Marc shares some details of the case study he will present jointly with Rob at the ARC forum about his experience implementing a cybersecurity strategy with the Dragos solution at NaturEner.

The Challenge of IT-OT Convergence and ICS Cybersecurity

Marc sheds some interesting light on the particular challenges faced by utilities and manufacturing industries when it comes to implementing a sound cybersecurity strategy at the industrial control system (ICS) level. The world of IT has traditionally set the pace for cybersecurity strategy, practices, and work processes, but the world of ICS has its own unique set of challenges. Combine this challenge with the fact that the operational technology (OT) world of ICS is converging with the world of It, and the challenges are even further compounded.

According to Marc, managing the cybersecurity in the IT focused world of his business presented some challenges on the OT and ICS side. According to Marc, “What I found was a real eye-opener, and this is the beginning of the story of how I was introduced to and met Rob and how we developed a partnership here to mitigate some of these issues. That came when we started to integrate the control systems that we had here with the wind farm assets to manage those generation assets. The wind farms themselves have a complex set of interconnected devices, but devices at the ICS level mostly remained off people’s radar when it came to cybersecurity concerns."

Marc and Rob's session is on Tuesday afternoon at 2 PM. Marc will also be a panelist during ARC's Cybersecurity Workshop sessions, which will run all day on Monday.